SHELTER FROM THE NORM
AUTHOR EXPLORES NORTH AMERICAN ANIMAL SANCTUARIES THAT SERVE A SAD, BUT NECESSARY ROLE
Vancouver author Nicholas Read has written a shelf full of books about all kinds of animals. His latest, A Home Away From Home: True Stories of Wild Animal Sanctuaries, looks at North American animal sanctuaries.
“It’s intended for middle school kids, but I hope that it won’t bore an adult,” Read says when asked about his 11th book.
A Home Away From Home sets out to educate readers about the people and places looking after exotic animals that have sadly been captured and bred for use in entertainment and as pets.
“While the idea of keeping a lion, a monkey or a python as a companion animal may seem crazy to you, it’s not to other people,” Read writes at the beginning of the book.
And the legal and illegal trade in exotic pets is as lucrative as the illegal drug trade, says Read.
“Tens of thousands of exotic animals are born in captivity each year in North America — many more tigers are born in Canada and the U.S. than will ever live in Canada.”
The internet has increased access to these animals. Go ahead and Google any animal and the words for sale. Faster that you can say “meow,” you land on a listing for a lion cub on offer for US$2,000.
People fall in love with a little Simba-like kitten jumping and rolling around, then a few years later they have an apex predator staring them down and roaring with earth-shaking ferocity.
Enter the need for a sanctuary to house these animals that could never be sent back to plains of Africa because they didn’t come from there.
You may as well send them to the moon.
“They find themselves, through no fault of their own, in a position where they are betwixt and between because they’re still wild animals, but they can’t be returned to the wild because they’re not equipped,” says Read. “They wouldn’t know how to exist in the wild. They couldn’t fend for themselves. So here they are, intrinsically wild, but they can’t live where they’re supposed to.”
Making the cut for the book is Greyhaven Exotic Bird Sanctuary in Surrey, B.C. Read explains that as many as two million parrots a year flood the exotic bird market. Parrots are hard to adopt out because, well, they can be difficult and they can live for 100 years, so a sanctuary like Greyhaven is a welcome facility.
As you read the book (it really isn’t just for kids) and learn about such great places as Greyhaven, the Performing Animals and Welfare Society (PAWS) in California, or Chimp Haven in Louisiana, you may pause at the sight of Carole Baskin, she of the hit Netflix series Tiger King and Dancing with the Stars fame. Unless you’re a chimp living in Chimp Haven, you have heard of this controversial character and her 25-year-old Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Tampa, Fla., and maybe her missing husband.
“I know really serious allegations have been made against her. None of them have been proved. What she does with her animals, as far as I know, is a good thing,” says Read.
“I discussed with the publisher adding what was said about her in the series to the text, and they said they didn’t want that because she was well enough known and that would distract from the real message of the book. So we did discuss it. I was for including something about the series and her in the book, otherwise, I thought that people might think I wasn’t aware of her sudden notoriety. But they said no, they didn’t want to do that.”
A Home Away From Home is eye opening, heartbreaking and heart warming.
Read’s lifelong love of animals is there on every page and within every word he writes about the special people who have sacrificed so much to give these often mistreated animals some dignity and quality of life.
“I have always had this visceral feeling towards animals. The thought of them suffering has always upset me terribly, for reasons I really can’t enumerate,” says Read. “It just comes from the gut.”
All money from the sales of the book goes to animal charities.